Dr. Ann Kay Lagarbo’s view of the world changed the night the Covington pediatrician found that faith could be more powerful than the medicine she practices.
Her grand-niece, 6-year-old Caroline Crouch, had just spent the past two days in Children’s Hospital in New Orleans having seizures caused by encephalitis.
Logarbo’s medical training – and that of the physicians attending to Caroline – told her that the little girl was probably brain- damaged, unable to breathe for herself, and she would soon die.
Logarbo said she knew medicine had done all it could do, and Caroline’s fate was in the hands of a Higher Power.
More and more, medicine acknowledges that faith and spirituality can be powerful tools in healing the sick. What happened to Caroline and Logarbo illustrates the question of what role, if any, does faith play in health and healing: Did the power of prayer pull Caroline from the brink of death in August three years ago? Or, was she just another example of the human body’s potential to recover from serious illnesses?
Deeply religious, Crouch’s extended family began to pray for Caroline. Logarbo’s mother-in-law, Ouida Logarbo from Baton Rouge, suggested prayers to Father Francis Xavier Seelos.
Logarbo had never heard of the Bavarian Roman Catholic priest who died of yellow fever in New Orleans in 1867. But others had heard of healings attributed to Seelos’ intercession, and the Vatican declared him blessed in 2000, one step away from sainthood.
The Seelos Center at St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church in downtown New Orleans has volunteers who offer prayers on behalf of the sick.
Catholics believe that special people, such as saints and the blessed, can act as intermediaries between people and God and make prayers stronger, said the Rev. Byron Miller, who is working to get Seelos declared a saint.
Logarbo said she believes Caroline’s recovery is a miracle – and it could be the one that elevates Seelos to sainthood.
“Caroline was going to be left … in a vegetative state” or completely bed ridden, Logarbo said. “I am supposed to preserve life at all costs,” she said, but said she began to feel that God should just take the child. The best prognosis she could see was dim: breathing apparatuses and feeding tubes for the rest of Caroline’s life.
“Caroline’s mother was just certain that God was going to step in,” Logarbo said.
On Monday afternoon, Logarbo tracked down the Seelos Center. All of their blessers were busy until the next day, but they began praying immediately.
Months later, when Logarbo looked at Caroline’s medical records, she could see what doctors couldn’t – Caroline’s vital signs began to improve in the same hour.
That night, “we were prepared for the worst” and about 1:30 a.m., Logarbo had the experience that she says changed her life.
“I receded to a corner and I told God, ‘I can’t do this any more. I cannot go on like this. It is not that I don’t believe You can save this child. Honest to God, there was no one who could save the child. The only way she is going to survive, the only way she is going to be given back to us, is God’s intervention.'”
Suddenly, Logarbo felt an “excruciating” pain in her chest and shortness of breath – and she thought it was ironic she could have a heart attack inside a children’s hospital. When she sat up, the shortness of breath disappeared. “There was this deep, deep, deep sensation in my chest. I didn’t hear anyone but what I felt was: Get up now and go see.”
“I felt this pull,” she said, and she left her sleeping family in the waiting room.
In the ICU, Caroline “had multiple tubes coming out of every orifice.” Logarbo leaned down to her face and said, “Caroline, I don’t know why I am here except God told me to come talk to you.”
“Your mom has been telling you to follow the angels, they are going to bring you back to us.”
She asked Caroline to help her show her mother there was hope.
Logarbo asked her to blink her eyes if Caroline could hear. After about a minute of asking, Logarbo said her great-niece faintly blinked.
“Her eyelashes fluttered. I wasn’t even sure I saw what I saw.” A respiratory therapist standing next to the little girl asked Logarbo to ask again.
“With the greatest difficultly, she fluttered her eyes and opened them just a little so slightly, so I could see her corneas. Being the ‘Doubting Thomas’ I am, I asked her to do it one more time.
“She moved her head about an inch, opened her eyes and closed them. At that point, everyone in the ICU started crying. We knew, at least at that point, the child could hear me.”
Logarbo ran to the waiting room with the news. Caroline’s mother, Mary Ann Crouch, “had the calmest look on her face. She said, ‘I told you, I told you.'” That was about 2 a.m.
About 9 a.m. the people from The Seelos Center came by to bless Caroline with a cross.
“She opened her eyes, followed the cross – from her head to her feet and from her left shoulder to her right shoulder.” Within a few minutes, a doctor conducted a neurological exam and “she started responding to commands. Move her leg. Move her arm,” Logarbo said.
By 5 p.m., the neurologists decided Caroline would live, but would probably require a year in the hospital, learning to walk and talk again.”
“On the Feast of the Assumption, which was eight days later, Caroline was discharged, walking and talking,” Logarbo said.
A week after being discharged, she was back in school. Today she is an honor roll student, learning to play piano and in every way healthy.
“Medically, there was no explanation for the recovery of Caroline,” Logarbo said.
Eric Ford of the Tulane Medical School in New Orleans is studying the link between faith and healing.
“Many studies have found a very strong, positive correlation between both spiritual and religious activities and health status. People who go to church more often tend to be healthier on average,” Ford said.
As the Baby Boom begins to enter the final phases of life -aging – there is more interest in such issues, Ford said. Research shows that as society ages, people become more spiritually attuned.
At the same time, those who practice medicine are asking more questions about the role of spirituality in healing and health. That’s because as more studies are done, more conclude, or at least point to, the idea that spirituality and religiosity (which is more measurable), have a role to play in health and healing, Ford said.
Even the National Institutes of Health shows a vigorous interest in the topic, with its alternative medicine branch funding more and more studies, Ford said.
For 2005, the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine has been increasing its funding for studies linking medicine and religion and faith from $1.4 million in fiscal year 1999 to $3.2 million for the 2003-2004 fiscal year.
“The problem is explaining why there seems to be a link – since the spiritual is difficult to measure,” Ford said.
There are “confounding” factors, such as those who go to church often lead a healthier lifestyle, may be more affluent, and seek health care more often, and other social and demographic factors that need to be controlled to make the observations better fit the rigors of scientific study, Ford said.
A Johns Hopkins study reported last year that there has been a resurgence of clinical and behavioral studies that have begun to clarify how spirituality and religion can contribute to the coping processes used in experiences of illness.
The study said patients wanted physicians to consider their spiritual needs in the course of treatment. The Rev. Don Owens, the chaplain for Tulane University Medical School, said some hospitals are taking patients’ spiritual history as well as their medical history.
Dr. Harold G. Koenig at Duke University’s Center of Spirituality, Theology and Health, said there is a growing science base showing a connection between religion and spirituality in both mental health and physical health as well as better disease outcomes. “There is a whole lot of smoke here,” he said.
“We are really on the beginning edge of medicine addressing these issues.”
“Religious people have lower blood pressure, better immune function and greater longevity,” he said.
“Lots of studies are beginning to show that people who have better immune functions do better with different health outcomes,” he said. Lowered immune systems can affect everything “from catching cold … to the spread of cancer.”
Andrew Skolnick, executive director of the Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (a part of the Center for Inquiry), said many such studies that show prayers to “evoke supernatural powers” often fall under what he calls “voodoo science” where methodology is poorly controlled.
“In some cases, they are misleading, deceptive and possibly fraudulent,” he said.
However, there has been a resurgence of studies that look at people who seek faith-based support and “and there is good solid evidence that people who have good social, psychological, spiritual support do better” in health outcomes, especially in those with terminal diseases having a better quality of life, said Skolnick, who was associate news editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Medical News in Perspective.
The reason for the cause and effect is still difficult to pin down.
Often medication takes times to get the right levels, so Caroline’s recovery “may be more of a coincidence.” An individual case such as Caroline’s “you can’t conclude much from that … one way or the other because there is no way to demonstrate what was the cause of her improvement,” Skolnick said.
In many cases, people who are prayed for still die, he said.
Rabbi Barry Weinstein of Congregation B’nai Israel said “in Jewish life we are encouraged … to properly take care of ourselves … your body is God’s creation, the vessel of the soul.”
“I would advise you – and myself as a survivor of prostate cancer – to do the following: attend the synagogue or worship, meet with your rabbi or priest for support in the spiritual struggle to recover from illnesses” and to pray for the doctors, science and medicine who are helping a person.
As a cancer patient, Weinstein was told to keep a positive mental attitude, and he used his faith and religion to do so.
“Bishop (Alfred) Hughes came to my home when I learned I had prostate cancer and prayed with me” along with the Rev. Jeff Bayhi, of the Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge, and the Rev. Chris Andrews, pastor of First United Methodist Church, all of whom Weinstein counts as friends.
“It was very helpful and very spiritual for my family.”
“To know there are people out there who care for us is a tremendous lift,” Weinstein said of having even strangers pray.
Faith in the possibility of being healed is also illustrated in Baton Rouge on the last Sunday of each month when people attend a healing Mass held after the noon Mass at St. Joseph Cathedral. The Father Seelos Mass is held for people who would like to be blessed with a relic holding a fragment of Seelos’ bones.
Marie Schroeder stayed after Sunday Mass in September to be anointed.
“I feel like I needed this anointment, she said.”
Schroeder suffers from fibromyelitis syndrome and has a degenerative disk in her back.
“This has given me the strength to deal with the pain and offer it as a prayer to God. If he so wishes, he might” stop the pain, she said.
Lena Baptiste limped away from the Rev. Gerard Young’s anointment. “I thought it might help me,” she said. “They say faith heals. I don’t think it is the (healing) service itself, but the faith you have in God.”
Preston Edwards, publisher of Black Collegiate Magazine and two Web sites, said he is certain Father Seelos cured him of cancer.
Four years ago, Edwards had a lymph gland removed and 10 days later received the shocking news – he had cancer of unknown origin. A cancer somewhere else had traveled to the lymph gland.
“I was told that I had a 40 percent chance of living for one year and a 10 percent chance of living two years – with treatment.”
Before he left to take a test to identify where the cancer was in his body, one of his employees slipped him a card. Inside was a Seelos relic, a small piece of cloth that had been used to bind Seelos’ bones when he was exhumed, and a Seelos prayer card.
While undergoing the scan, Edwards rubbed the cloth on his surgical scar and repeated the prayer, asking Seelos’ help.
“I just about had it remembered,” he said of the number of times he repeated the prayer during the 30-minute procedure.
A few days later, his doctor told him the PET scan did not detect cancer anywhere in his body. Edwards said he still goes to his doctor every quarter to get checked because his physician is convinced that Edwards had cancer, and he wants to keep a close eye on his patient.
Edwards said he recently told a dermatologist who looked for his lymph gland scar and couldn’t find it. “She said, ‘Who is your surgeon?’ I said, ‘God is.'”
Edwards is a volunteer for The Seelos Center. He carries a small relic wherever he goes – until he gets a chance to tell his story and pass on the relic.
Meanwhile, Caroline recently underwent testing requested by the Vatican in its determination of whether the healing was a miracle. If it is, Seelos will be on his way to becoming Saint Seelos.
More information
Check out www.2theadvocate.com for more about “Faith and Healing”:
Advocate photos in narrated photo galleries.
Caroline Crouch playing the piano.
Message boards discussing “Faith and Healing.”
Advocate reporter Mike Dunne’s report prepared for WBRZ-Channel 2.
Links to the National Institutes of Health, Duke University and more.
The “Faith and Healing” stories in today’s Advocate are a joint project of the newspaper, WBRZ-TV and www.2theadvocate.com WBRZ will air a segment on this topic at 10 p.m. Sunday. The Web site has additional information. Click on the “Faith and Healing” button.
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